Burned

by Sam McBride

  It was the second day of Nolan’s coverage in the wake of the Spotlight broadcast on the Tuesday night. His team had been on to the scandal as well, digging around in the final weeks of the Spotlight investigation, and therefore immediately grasped the significance of the whistleblower going to Foster directly.

  Nolan – whose programme was part breaking news, part phone-in – cut through the complexity of the story to explain in graphic terms how the money had been squandered and what that meant for others who depended on public money.

  From the morning after Spotlight, he was hearing from people who couldn’t afford to heat their own homes who were livid at what they had watched. An elderly woman was interviewed live from her bed where she was wrapped in a blanket because she couldn’t afford to turn on the heating.

  On the other side of the world in a luxury hotel, Foster was vulnerable. But the DUP leader, perhaps insulated from reality by the extended honeymoon she had enjoyed since becoming First Minister, was slow to grasp the threat which the story posed to her.

  Back at Stormont the following Monday – six days after Spotlight – Foster knew she had to address the issue publicly after a weekend of revelations about DUP links to RHI boilers. That represented the emergence of a narrative of DUP links to claimants – something which would prove calamitous for the party.

  That Monday morning Foster agreed to give a 12-minute interview to BBC NI’s political editor, Mark Devenport. When asked if the public was owed an apology, Foster ducked the question, saying that ‘the implementation of the scheme is something I do regret’, before shifting to highlight the failures of many others involved in RHI.

  Devenport pressed her on whether she owed the whistleblower an apology. Slightly irritated, Foster corrected him for using the phrase ‘claw some of this back’ in relation to the overspend, noting ‘you don’t claw back something if you haven’t spent it’. She was less keen to directly answer his question but offered no apology, with the First Minister again shifting focus to ‘my officials’ who she said failed the whistleblower.

  It was a sign of the pressure on the DUP that during the interview Foster performed a rapid U-turn, abandoning the stance of the minister responsible for RHI, Simon Hamilton, just four days earlier when he had said that ‘the Data Protection Act prevents, even if I wanted to, me from putting these names [of RHI claimants] into the public domain’. Foster, seemingly influenced by the fact that DUP-linked names on the list had started to leak out, said it was now her desire to see all the names published.

  The interview also confirmed a fact which had been widely rumoured among political journalists and at Stormont, but which had not yet been reported – that Stephen Brimstone had an RHI boiler. Brimstone had suddenly left his job as one of Foster’s spads about a fortnight earlier. It was claimed at the time that he was leaving the £92,000 job to which he had been reappointed just six months earlier to pursue unspecified private sector endeavours.

  When asked by Devenport if Brimstone had an RHI boiler, Foster’s answer was somewhat vague: ‘Yes, as far as I understand Stephen was a claimant.’ In fact, Brimstone had gone to Foster almost a year earlier, within days of her becoming First Minister, and told her that he had a boiler.

  That conversation in her Parliament Buildings’ office was brief because, Brimstone later recounted, Foster simply asked him: ‘Are you happy everything’s OK with it?’ and when he said that he was ‘that was the end of the matter’. Foster did not ask him to make a written declaration of interest, and over coming weeks he was sent correspondence about what was becoming increasingly urgent attempts to close RHI.

  When asked about keeping a written record, Brimstone told the inquiry ‘that wasn’t the way we worked … other than a letter of resignation or a letter of appointment – that was the sorts of things that you put in writing to each other [sic].’

  As Christmas approached, there was a belief among senior DUP figures – and some in Sinn Féin – that the story would blow over. They could not have been more wrong.

  CHAPTER 18

  FIRE, AND BRIMSTONE’S PROBLEM

  For seven years, Stephen Brimstone was getting headaches. When the weather was cold and he crossed the yard from his home to work in an outbuilding, as with most garages or sheds, there was no permanent heating.

  Brimstone wanted to have the building – which resembled a very generously sized garage – heated, so he used both an electric heater and a portable oil-fired heater. But the oil heater emitted fumes which hurt Brimstone’s head whenever he went to the shed to repair a tractor or check on sheep from his father-in-law’s nearby farm which might be temporarily residing in a corner of the building.

  For seven years, the DUP spad put up with the headaches. But in late 2014, Brimstone began to consider a solution: he would install an RHI boiler in his shed. By the summer of the following year – as RHI was running out of control and others in the DUP were involved in delaying it being reined in – Brimstone settled on what he would do.

  The 36-year-old party loyalist decided that he would install a wood pellet boiler in the shed, use it to heat the shed when he needed it, and run most of the heat via an underground pipe to his large detached home in the countryside outside Ballymena.

  A welcome bonus of his decision was that as well as curing his sore head it meant that it moved him on to the lucrative non-domestic RHI scheme. That meant that as Brimstone stood in the shower each morning he could do so in the knowledge that the more heat he used, the more he earned.

  The vast bulk of the heat from Brimstone’s boiler was going to heat his house and there was a domestic RHI scheme he could have entered. But its terms were far less lucrative, involving set payments for seven years – not the unlimited 20-year ‘cash for ash’ payments under the non-domestic scheme.

  Although it would seem strange to the average person that a tiny use of heat in an outbuilding would allow someone to get paid under a non-domestic scheme for heating their home, Brimstone believed that was within the letter of the law which his party colleagues had brought through the Assembly.

  He had encountered RHI through his work as spad to the Social Development Minister. Using his Stormont connections, Brimstone asked fellow spad Andrew Crawford for some help. In November 2014, Crawford asked a DETI official for the phone number of Stuart Wightman, the key RHI official, and passed the number to Brimstone.

  Brimstone did not call Wightman for about three months, but eventually phoned in February 2015. Wightman remembered the call because it was unusual. The spad, who gave his name but did not identify himself as a senior Stormont figure, began by saying: ‘I believe you’re the man to talk to about RHI.’

  It was only after the call that Wightman worked out the identity of the man to whom he had spoken. Even in the fairly anonymous world of spads, Brimstone, whose name was in itself memorable, had a degree of public notoriety. Three years earlier, BBC Spotlight had broadcast an investigation which centred on a whistleblower, the DUP councillor Jenny Palmer. Palmer, who was a DUP representative on the board of the Housing Executive, the public sector social housing body, said that she had been put under inappropriate pressure by Brimstone to change her vote on the board. The vote related to a request by Brimstone’s minister, Nelson McCausland, to extend a maintenance contract for the controversial firm Red Sky.

  The £8 million-a-year contract had been terminated amid allegations of over-charging and Palmer was concerned about its activities. But Brimstone, she said, told her how to vote, adding bluntly: ‘The party comes first. You do what you’re told.’

  The DUP denied that some of its senior figures had links to the firm and Brimstone said that Palmer’s account of their conversation was inaccurate. However, a lengthy Assembly committee inquiry process – during which there were farcical scenes as Brimstone either refused to answer multiple questions or repeatedly said he could not remember what had happened – found Palmer to have been a credible witness while it describ
ed Brimstone as ‘deliberately evasive in his answers to the point of obstructing the committee’, a finding with which DUP members of the committee disagreed.

  In August, six months after he had called the civil servant for advice, Brimstone’s 32 kW boiler was installed. But there was another factor which made the Stormont adviser’s situation highly unusual – he had removed an existing domestic wood pellet boiler in order to install one which would be eligible for RHI.

  The Fermanagh-born spad had put in a biomass boiler in 2007 and received a £3,000 government grant to do so. Biomass boilers are expected to have a life expectancy of between 15 and 20 years but Brimstone said that his became costly to maintain after just eight years and it was that – rather than a desire to make money – which led him to scrap it.

  Whatever Brimstone’s motivation and whatever the letter of the law said, if the regulations allowed someone to use a non-domestic boiler to heat their home when they had very little other need for heat, there were obvious deficiencies in how the scheme was set up.

  In June 2015 he agreed to the installation of a boiler at a cost of about £15,500, writing on his application form that the shed was ‘used for both machinery and at times animal pens for out farm livestock (namely sheep) that require close monitoring and heat during lambing season’.

  Brimstone described the shed as a ‘non-domestic’ building, save for ‘one small area … used at times for storage of firewood’.

  Denzil Cluff, who checked the boiler on behalf of the installer, recalled that among other things the shed held several domestic items – a ride-on lawn mower, a canoe and a ‘substantial amount of firewood’.

  Around that time, and for reasons which remain unclear, Brimstone became involved in discussions between the two main DUP spads dealing with RHI – Crawford and Cairns. The 8 July ministerial submission to Jonathan Bell was forwarded to him by Cairns. That document made clear that RHI could not be afforded and would have to be urgently reined in by the autumn. Brimstone, by this stage just three weeks away from having his boiler installed, emailed back to say that it was ‘hard to argue with what’s being suggested’.

  The following month Brimstone’s parents-in-law, major farmers John and Lilian Anderson, would install two RHI boilers which between them would attract payments of more than £85,000 in their first year and a half of operation. Brimstone’s brother Aaron, who ran a go-karting business in County Fermanagh, installed a boiler in January 2016, the month before RHI was shut for good. At the public inquiry, Brimstone said that he had not played any role in his relatives’ applications.

  Over many months from the summer of 2015 onwards, Brimstone would intermittently go on to be involved in internal discussions about how to handle the RHI problem without ever formally declaring a very obvious financial interest. At no time in 2015 did he even informally say to others that he had an RHI boiler. By early 2016 he spoke to the First Minister about it but she did not tell him to provide any sort of written record of his potential conflict of interest.

  Confronted with that at the public inquiry in 2018, Brimstone admitted that he should have immediately declared an interest and then taken no part in the discussions. ‘I thoroughly regret not putting my hands up and withdrawing myself,’ he said.

  ***********

  On the morning of 10 May 2016, senior Ofgem manager Edmund Ward opened his post to find an anonymous letter which raised his eyebrows in the Milbank office where he was based. Even without any special knowledge of Ulster politics, it was clear from the letter that there was an allegation of fraud against a senior political figure.

  Ward, a mild-mannered specialist who headed up the teams responsible for technical decisions relating to RHI, immediately scanned the letter and forwarded it to colleague Teri Clifton in Glasgow, Ofgem’s head of operations responsible for administering the Northern Ireland scheme.

  Who sent the letter remains a mystery, but whoever it was had an intimate knowledge of Brimstone’s heating arrangements. The allegation was that Brimstone was heating his home with a boiler receiving subsidy under the non-domestic RHI when he should have been on the domestic scheme. He was doing so, the letter said, by telling Ofgem that the boiler was installed in an agricultural shed. The typed letter alleged that Brimstone’s activities amounted to ‘total fraud … in keeping with the mindset of our political elite’.

  The letter went on to question whether Brimstone had any agricultural business of his own – something which seemed significant if his justification for having a non-domestic boiler was that he had a sideline as a farmer. Showing detailed knowledge of the spad’s arrangements, the individual said that Brimstone had a flock number but told Ofgem to ask him whether he had any sheep and alleged that on his form for EU farm subsidy there was no mention of him owning any land. In blunt language, the letter writer said: ‘The shed is no more agricultural than he is! He is using the pellet boiler to heat his mansion home at the TAX PAYERS [sic] expense! This is a total fraud!’

  What would become Case 335 for Ofgem’s counter-fraud team would expose Brimstone to deeply uncomfortable public scrutiny, and by the time the investigation was complete he would no longer be working for Foster. It would also reveal multiple concerns about both the poor drafting of the RHI regulations and Ofgem’s enforcement of them.

  On receiving the letter, Clifton immediately used her power to halt payments to Brimstone and asked for an audit of his installation. However, under Ofgem’s sluggish processes it took six weeks for his premises to be inspected. And remarkably, even though this was a targeted inspection about a detailed allegation of fraud, Brimstone was phoned before the audit to alert him to the date of the inspection.

  The DUP adviser was unhappy that the audit was to be on a day when he was on a foreign holiday, meaning that it was his father-in-law who showed the inspector around.

  The auditor’s report included the observation that he ‘could find no evidence of the building described as agricultural workshop/storage being used as a workshop or for animal pens as described’. That, he said, constituted non-compliance. In simple terms, it meant that the auditor believed that Brimstone was breaking the rules.

  The auditor reported that inside the shed he had found a tractor, shelving, tools and some fencing posts – but also children’s toys. There was ‘no sign of animals having been there or any adaption for that purpose’. He gave the site an overall assurance rating of ‘weak’ because it was in breach of the rules but said those ‘moderate issues with eligibility … can be rectified within a reasonable timescale’.

  In Glasgow, Clifton was unsettled by the auditor’s report. She did not feel that it provided the ‘definitive evidence’ she had hoped for as to whether he was a legitimate claimant or a fraudster.

  On 3 August, she emailed a colleague to discuss what she termed ‘our special case’. She was acutely aware of Brimstone’s position as an adviser to the First Minister but later told the inquiry that he had been subject to the same rules and processes as any other member of the public.

  Eventually Ofgem wrote to Brimstone asking for explanations and was satisfied with his responses. On 23 September 2016, it informed him that his situation was acceptable and payments resumed.

  But within three weeks – perhaps another indication that the person making the allegations was either close to Brimstone or had access to some of his RHI information – a second note making similar allegations was sent to the DUP’s political nemesis, Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) leader Jim Allister. The MLA passed on the note, which bore similarities to the May letter, to the Northern Ireland Audit Office, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and Ofgem – unaware that Ofgem had already investigated the issue.

  The Audit Office forwarded the note to the DUP-run Department for the Economy and asked it to investigate. Two days after that letter from the Audit Office, the DUP spad in the department, John Robinson, went and directly told Brimstone that there had been an allegation that his
RHI boiler was fraudulent. That was potentially significant because although Brimstone knew that he had been audited, he did not know that it was because of an allegation against him.

  Despite the timing of that conversation with Brimstone, Robinson told the inquiry that he was unaware of the letter from the Audit Office at that point and that instead he had received an entirely different briefing from his permanent secretary in relation to the first Ofgem investigation of Brimstone.

  On Robinson’s evidence, that seemingly quite anodyne news – that a complaint had been investigated but dismissed – led him to immediately send a text message to Timothy Johnston, the DUP’s most senior backroom figure, to say: ‘I need a [sic] urgent word with you before your next meeting. It’s RHI and Stephen.’ Robinson then travelled that day to Stormont Castle and told Johnston that Brimstone had been investigated.

  Brimstone then joined the two spads and, according to Robinson, was told that he had been investigated and cleared – something he knew anyway by that stage because Ofgem had written to him. Robinson said he did not tell Brimstone that he was still being investigated because to do so would have been inappropriate.

  Less than a fortnight later, on the morning of 24 October, Johnston emailed his senior spad colleague Richard Bullick to say that Robinson was ‘in possession of more material about sb [Brimstone] and his rhi [sic] application. We are both of the view this is not good, now involves the Auditor General and will not end well’. Bullick replied almost immediately to say ‘oh dear’ and said he would call.

  Three weeks later, Brimstone resigned from his £92,000-a-year job as a spad, just six months after being reappointed by Foster. Brimstone has always said that his resignation, just three weeks before the BBC Spotlight programme, had nothing to do with RHI.